Republican presidential candidates offered a variety of solutions to the fentanyl epidemic plaguing the United States, including shooting drug smugglers caught at the border “stone-cold dead.”
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) took the toughest tone on the border, vowing to make Mexico pay to finish a wall at the southern border through unusual means and repeating a call to use lethal action against any person who tries to bring the deadly drug onto U.S. soil.
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“I’m going to stop the invasion cold. I am going to deport people who came illegally, and I’m even going to build the border wall and have Mexico pay for it like Donald Trump promised,” said DeSantis. “Mexico’s not going to fork over money. We’re going to impose fees on the remittances that foreign workers send to foreign countries. We’ll raise billions of dollars. I’ll build a wall.”
DeSantis also vowed to get Congress to dub the Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” and approve the use of deadly force, as well as station U.S. ships off the Mexican coast to interdict any fentanyl ingredients that China might send to Mexico.
“I’ll tell you this, if someone in the drug cartels is sneaking fentanyl across the border when I’m president, that’s going to be the last thing they do. We’re going to shoot him stone-cold dead,” said DeSantis.
Haley called on the United States to stop all “normal trade relations” with China until entities in China stop providing fentanyl pill presses and precursor ingredients to Mexico, where the cartels make the final product and move it over the southern border.
The former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations said she would send in the U.S. military to “take out” the cartels and boost the number of federal immigration and border law enforcement by 25,000.
Haley and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie agreed that responding to the fentanyl crisis was not only a matter of cutting off the drug supply but dealing with the demand side.
“The first thing that we have to do is really focus on mental health and addiction centers. It is something that is needed in our country terribly because we don’t deal with mental health and someone … falls into addiction,” said Haley. “We owe it to them to treat it like cancer.”
Christie said addiction was a disease and that dealing with the root cause of why so many Americans have turned to substances would address the demand side of the equation.
Scott proposed targeting the finances of Mexican cartels and Chinese money launderers so that profits from fentanyl sales cannot make it back to Mexico, crippling the cartels from continuing their drug trade.
But entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy offered the most unique proposal. Ramaswamy attempted to correct DeSantis, who called it a fentanyl “overdose,” to instead call it a “poisoning” because some drug users are not aware that the pill they have purchased or consumed may be laced with fentanyl. For that reason, Ramaswamy said the fentanyl crisis is not a drug problem.
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“It’s closer to bioterrorism,” said Ramaswamy.
In fiscal 2023, which ended in September, U.S. Customs and Border Protection seized more than 6 billion potentially lethal doses of fentanyl at the border. Approximately 90% of fentanyl seized occurred at ports of entry.
